Time and Light Switches

This week was my birthday, I turned 22. I get quite emotional on my birthday, and there are quite a few other emotional things going on both this week and in general. So this week has become one of rest weather I liked it or not. That’s part of the creative process, like life, you have to rest.   Most times my struggle is not having enough of an outlet for my creativity. So I can get quite antsy when I have to rest. Because I get worried that in my rest somehow it will break my creativity. I honestly get the worry from an honest place. I had taken a very long break from painting and it took so much work to come back from that. So sometimes I get worried. And truly I need to chill out a little and just be okay with the rest, but it’s not that simple for me.  This week has been one to rest and it has pushed all my buttons. Oh you need to get work, you need to be productive, you need to constantly be on the move. My constant internal dialogue, and the reply comes as, I’m ti...

For about the past year I’ve spent a fair amount of intentional time working on a “long term writing project.” And just to be clear it is still far from done. It is completely unlike anything I have and do write here for Time and Light Switches. It often takes some adjusting when I have to switch between the project and writing here for the blog. It is a different enough mental process that I find it extremely difficult to jump between the two writing styles.   This other witting project is very near and dear to my heart and is also still in its early stages of the process. As an artist there are some projects that I play close to the chest, so to speak. It is still in the planning/ constructing stage of creation so I don’t want to share too much. To give you a bit of a hint though the project is all story focused and it is a story I want desperately to do justice.  Here, on Time and Light Switches, I’m talking to you the reader about any number of very real and emotional ...

Often I start with an idea, or a feeling. Seldom do I have a plan right off the bat, planning can take quite a bit of time for me. But if I’m not carful I will get stuck in the planning and never get going. So I’ve learned to be okay with learning on the go. I’ve come to expect that I’ll only figure out some parts of the process once I start moving.   There’s the old saying “practice makes perfect” and well perfect doesn’t really exist, practice does make learning. I’m someone who doesn’t really learn something well unless I can see it or I’m doing or practising it. Which was something I had consciously forgot until I was in the middle of the painting I talked about in last weeks post.  In the age of social media and instant gratification it is easy to forget that not everything happens so fast. Most things take time and they are meant to. I didn’t get to my level of skill over night, it has come with years upon years of perseverance. And it often takes me hours to complet...

  In the 245 words that make up my first attempt at this weeks blog post it all amounts to nothing but a pity party. I had paused to start a Canva to go along with the blog post and when I came back I saw that I hadn’t written with much substance, it was complaining and self pity. Now it was well written complaining and the root of it was completely valid and came from a real struggle but it was complaining non-the-less.   So I made myself go and change my mindset. I went to my art studio and I did the finishing/small details on a painting that was giving my problems. And as I was painting I decided something. The painting in question would not be put up for sale. And it wasn’t because I loved it too much to part with it, no quite the opposite. It had too many flaws and too many areas to fix, I would have to redo the entirety of it if I wanted to sell it. It isn’t an excellent painting.  I was trying to take this and translate it onto a much smaller canvas. At this ...